Make backing up a new year’s resolution

If the thought of loosing all of your personal photos and documents fills you with dread, it is vital that you have a backup strategy for your data. We are increasingly being called to the rescue when people have had major disk failure and do not have a backup in place. Tekkie Help is here to ensure you take the necessary steps to protect your data.
Let us start in defining what a back up is. A Back up is a copy of data taken at a certain time. This copy can be held “on-site” and “off-site”.

Onsite data backup
This where the copy of the data is stored at the same location as where the data is created. Onsite storage devices can be a computer hard drive, CD/DVDs, USB memory drives, external hard drives and NAS drives (network attached storage).

Offsite data backup
This is where data is stored in a different geographic location, transferred either using one of the removable storage media mentioned above or electronically, using an online backup service. Online backup is a web-based (Cloud) service, such as DropBox, SkyDrive and Google Drive, which enables your data to be uploaded to a remote managed storage facility via the Internet.

Comparing the two, Onsite backup is fast, simple and cost-effective but has the major disadvantage being physically located close to the source data. This makes it possible for a fire, flood, theft etc to make both the source copy and backup copy inaccessible. Offsite backup usually works out to be more expensive and takes more effort to implement but means you will still be able to access your data in the case of a catastrophe which destroys the source data.

In terms of automatic backups, both onsite and offsite solutions can be set up to backup “live” or at regular intervals. It is important to note that only having a live backup carries a significant risk. For example, you might accidentally delete some photos or a file and this mistake will be replicated to the live backup resulting in data loss. The optimum solution is to keep both an onsite and offsite copy which includes both a live backup and historic backup of your data as it was, say one month before. If you do this you have cracked it – a resilient solution that should deal with most eventualities!